Members of the oversight board would be well-served by remembering that Puerto Rico is not just an Excel sheet that needs all columns and rows to equal zero. It’s a US jurisdiction with 3.5 million Americans that’s facing an exodus of talent and skilled labor as the island’s fiscal problems intensify.

The board should know that its plan is no different from the routes taken by the previous two governors, who for eight years applied their own flavors of austerity with no real signs of success. Former Governor Luis Fortuño (2009-2013) enacted Act 7 to oust thousands of public workers and suspend a number of collective-bargaining agreements. Former Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla (2013-2017) followed suit with his own piece of legislation, Act 66, which further froze collective-bargaining agreements and curtailed the incremental cost of public expenses.

Yet, the oversight board has requested a whopping $3 billion in spending reductions during a two-year period to address an ever-deepening fiscal deficit that is expected to average $7 billion annually from 2019 to 2026. Half of those cuts alone are aimed at the most essential of services: $1 billion in healthcare, $300 million in education, and $200 million from the commonwealth’s severely underfunded pension system.

What’s more, in rejecting Governor Ricardo Rossello’s recently submitted fiscal plan, which slashes expenses by roughly $2 billion, the oversight board called for even deeper cuts by fiscal year 2021, including $1.3 billion in personnel-related expenditures and $450 million—or nearly half—of the University of Puerto Rico’s budget. The final version of the plan certified last week by the board calls on the commonwealth to reduce expenses by $3.2 billion by fiscal year 2021.

To offset some of the pain, the board has also green-lit the implementation of a little more than $1.5 billion in revenue enhancements during the same time period, including improved tax collection, a wider taxable base, and the extension of an excise tax for offshore manufacturing companies known as Act 154.

Yet strangely absent from the board’s recipe is any mention of specific measures that would actually help grow Puerto Rico’s battered economy.